Tychus
Character Tychus is a strong offensive character that excels at pressuring hatcheries but struggles with bosses compared to Nova or Swann. He deals very high sustained damage and AoE with his talents and masteries and makes a great character for pushing with troops and holding locations against enemy waves. His unlocked mastery is Psionic Warrior, the mastery takes away your Psionic Storm skill and instead gives you a 10% chance to cast it when attacking enemies, with the storm centered on the enemy you are attacking when it procs. This takes his AoE damage and ramps it up hugely with massive hordes of enemies thanks to his high attack speed, pushing through the enemy lines to expose structures becomes very easy with a Psi-Warrior Tychus leading the charge. Against bosses you will find your damage lack-luster for the most part, you can deal lots of damage but it takes time to do it. However, your attacks ignore enemy armor, so even though your damage is low it will be constant across all enemies. If you are fighting alone then try and use troop lines to slow enemies down letting you get your high sustain damage onto the boss for long enough to chip it's health bar down and remember to use Flaming Betties to break aggro and reposition. Key Talents Masteries Guides BlacKcuD and Tankz have release a full-fletched Mental Guide. It covers basic strategy, Perk, Mastery and talent choices. Link to guide. Example Hellwalker Mastery / perk Order Perks: # Bug Zapper - Take this. # Air Support - Decent early game push. Highground vision will help you. # Onslaught - your best option here. # Tenacity - Snare immunity helps a lot. Minerals saved on death, too. More health is debatable cause you lack selfheal. If you know what you do (i.e. some wins on it) skip that perk. # Weaponsmith or Compartmentalization - Would go for the second one. You basically dont have any decent perk anymore. # Doomsday - nukes speed things up. # Beginner Perks: Scrolling down you'll find an easy to follow list. Mastery: # Close Quarter Combat - Armor increase is the most important thing early on. The moment you hit ~20 Armor which is done with this mastery and big armor increase you're mostly immune to any early game damage. Grenade damage is the second most important thing. # Haywire Missile - slight damage increase. Mostly vs Buildings. Trying to haywire Spine Crawler helps but takes a lot of time. Grenade it. # Lightweight Equipment - More grenades. # Psionic Warrior - Keep your level 30 mastery point for this. # Weapons Research - slight range increase and grenade damage. # Big Game Hunter - more grenade damage. # Weakspot - Helps against Behemoth. Apart from that mostly useless. Some more Haywire damage. # Ranger - Detection. Buffs your autoattack range with weapons research mastery above Spine crawler range. You want this before pushing into Omegalisk lair. Roughly at level 50 or 60 depending on your route. Apart from the range it is mostly useless. Detection is provided by Air Support perk. # Mind Bender - Slow. This is insane. Helps a lot. In group play take this after Psionic. Roughly at level 40. May be one of your best choices against omega. # Energy - increased shield regeneration. Kiting ability with Mind bender mastery. # Nuke at level 70 or 80. Generally you're bad fighting spine crawlers early on. Grenade helps. Grenade on unit spawns. Grenade rocks. Every other spell is a waste of energy unless you've score. Early detection is useless for you. You suck against bosses. You're awesome at cleaning trash and drops. Homebase buff is your best friend till score. Sticking with your mates helps for score. After score you can mostly just run around on trash and it dies from Psionic Warrior spells. You may have a slight issue with Omegalisk, however you're really bad against him anyway. In solo you want to delay him as long as possible to get more talents. Going all-rounder mastery on level 0 may be your best choice if you really struggle with him. Should mention that his aoe lowers your autoattack speed. So weakspot mastery is pretty bad. Energy mastery helps with shield regain, Mind bender mastery helps with controlling him. You should pull him to your north base. Should mention that there is a very little sweet spot where you can hit him with storm while he cant hit you. (Requires energy + Mind bender, tho). Homebase buff is your friend! Take this as an example: '''Perks: '''Onslaught, Bug Zapper, Air Support, Tenacity '''Masteries: ' # Close Quarter Combat # Lightweight Equipment # Haywire Missile # Psionic Warrior (Level 30, saving point) # Mind Bender (Level 40) # Weapons Research (Bonus Mastery) # Big Game Hunter (Level 50) # Ranger (Level 60) # Nuke (Level 70) Example Mental Mastery Order # Haywire Missile MasteryOrder theorycrafted by [[MMEUTankz]] on 27/04/2015. Reasons stated in the article - This mastery is hands down the strongest early game mastery. The burst allows you to kill everything quicker, and you can use it to dance in and out of Spine Crawlers' range while killing them from far away. # Ranger Mastery - Outside of detection, the increased range from this mastery makes it very strong as a second mastery. Not only that, but if you happen to get the auto turret drop early on, you will get a monster of a turret every time its dropped. # Weapons Research Mastery - Since it grants a higher damage advantage than Weakspot Mastery and provides 0.5 range, making it possible to outrange Spine Crawlers, this is definitely your third mastery, as nothing else comes close to its usefulness at this point. # Weakspot Mastery - Just a raw damage increase against everything. Since its higher than CQC, you want this instead of CQC. # Psionic Warrior Mastery - The strongest mastery by far that Tychus has. It removes the ability to cast storm, but puts a 10% chance on your auto attacks to proc storm. Combining that with Berserk, which increases your attack speed and movement speed every time you use psionic storm/frag grenade, means that you will have a nearly 100% uptime on this buff, giving a way higher DPS. # Lightweight Equipment Mastery - Cooldown reduction on your flaming betty is REALLY handy to have at this point, as it makes it a lot easier to deal with the primal brutalisk. # Nuke mastery from Leviathan, as you will be using nukes from this point on. # Energy Mastery OR Close Quarter Combat Mastery - if you need energy, take that, if not, CQC is better. It doesn't really matter what you take after this, and its completly up to you if you need more energy in case you took CQC, more damage if you took energy mastery or missing some key talents. Mental Solo Replays http://drop.sc/398542 - Mental solo tychus in 2:39:40. References